Ignorance Not Bliss (Scary Black People Related)
CousinLarry
4,618 Posts
This is one of the more interesting articles I have read about the NOLA aftermath. Apparently the best thing you can do for flood victims is to buy yourself a gun and get real scared. How long before shit gets real ugly in Baton Rouge?September 7, 2005Amid One City's Welcome, a Tinge of BacklashBy PETER APPLEBOMEBATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 6 - Last week came the rumors - of riots at Wal-Marts, of break-ins at homes, of drug gangs from New Orleans roaming the streets of its more sedate neighbor 75 miles up Interstate 10.Today came the reality - of a dozen or more relatives crowded under one roof, of hours stuck in traffic trying to get to school or work, of frustration and fear about what kind of city Baton Rouge will be with at least 100,000 evacuees and rescue workers added to the 227,000 residents it had before the storm hit.Make no mistake. The overwhelming response of people in Baton Rouge to Hurricane Katrina has been one of compassion and sacrifice with every church in town, it seems, housing or feeding evacuees. But there have also been runs on gun stores, mounting frustration over gridlocked roads and an undercurrent of fear about crime and the effect of the evacuees.After the chaos of the storm, which did some damage here, and a long weekend, Tuesday was the first day most residents returned to work and school. Before the evacuation, blacks made up about half the population of Baton Rouge and almost 70 percent of New Orleans, and in conversations in which race is often explicit or just below the surface, voices on the street, in shops, and especially in the anonymous hothouse of talk radio were raising a new question: just how compassionate can this community, almost certainly home to more evacuees than any other, afford to be? "You can't take the city out of the yat, and you can't take the yat out of the city," said Frank Searle, a longtime Baton Rouge resident, using a slang term for New Orleanians derived from the local greeting, "Where y'at?" "These people will not assimilate here," Mr. Searle said. "They put up with the crime in New Orleans, and now it's staring them in the face, but up here that's not going to be tolerated. People are going to handle it individually if they have to. This is the South. We will take care of it."For a week Baton Rouge, the state capital, home of Louisiana State University and a place that sees itself as a less raucous cousin to what had been the kingdom of sin and merriment to its south, has been trying to come to terms with its sudden status as the state's most populous city."It's a new Baton Rouge we're living in, isn't it?" said Jeanine Smallwood of suburban Prairieville, in the middle of a 90-minute drive to work that should have taken 20. Like many people in and near Baton Rouge, Mrs. Smallwood, her 1,700-square-foot house now sheltering 14 people, is trying to balance the need for compassion with the vertigo of a changed city. And so while she wishes all the evacuees well, she said she feared an influx of people from the housing projects of New Orleans, places, she has heard, where people walk around in T-shirts that read, "Kill the cops.""Or so the story has it," she said. "Those aren't neighborhoods I go to."She was so rattled, she said, she told her daughter she might have to move. On reflection, she said, there is little chance of that. Instead, she is hoping for the best."People are, what's the word? Not frustrated, not scared, it's more like their lives are on hold, everything's changed and we're trying to figure out what the new normal is going to be," Mrs. Smallwood said.Many relief workers and volunteers say the worries over crime reflect more wholesale stereotyping of people fleeing a catastrophe than anything based in fact, but safety is a major issue. At the height of the post-storm panic last week, people waited in line for three and a half hours at Jim's Firearms, a giant gun and sporting goods store. Many were people from New Orleans with their own safety issues. But many were local residents jumpy about the newcomers from New Orleans and stocking up on Glock and Smith & Wesson handguns.Jim Siegmund, a salesman at Jim's recently returned from military service in Iraq, said he did not think there was anything to worry about. Still, holding a cellphone in his hand and comparing it to a 9-millimeter handgun he said: "When push comes to shove, this won't protect you, but a Glock 9 will."Joel Phillips, a 38-year-old contractor, said he had never owned a gun in his life, but after watching an angry argument at a gas station, he stood in line for three hours at Jim's to buy a 9-millimeter Ruger handgun and then went with a friend to a firing range over the weekend to learn how to use it."I have two daughters, I sometimes have to work in bad neighborhoods," Mr. Phillips said. "I probably don't need it, but I'll feel better knowing that I have some protection." Many evacuees are staying with family or friends, their campers, S.U.V.'s and pickups parked on front lawns or circular driveways.Most people at the broad array of shelters were dazed but appreciative of the help from local volunteers like the Louisiana State University students, upbeat and attentive, tending to sick and exhausted evacuees at the triage center on campus.But others, particularly those at the main Red Cross shelter at the River Center convention center downtown, were seething with frustration, not just over the disaster they were fleeing, but from the sense that they were being treated not so much like guests as people being warehoused until they could be shipped elsewhere. Patricia Perry, a postal employee from New Orleans, said anyone with a wristband from the River Center shelter was being stereotyped outside it as one of "those people" - looters, criminals, outcasts. "It's like a stigma," she said. "All they really want to do is get us out of town. Well, I'm from Louisiana. I work hard. I pay my taxes. Surely, this state can find a place for us to live." Still, many residents, with the sense of intimacy that remains so much a part of Southern life, took their role as hosts seriously, as if it would be bad manners, the ultimate sin in the South, to do otherwise.So when Pam Robertson, manager of a convenience store, asked a customer how he was doing, it was not dutiful chatter but a real question that begged for a real answer.When it came, she took the man's hand in hers over the counter and talked about her friend Hunter, evacuated from Loyola University, about her upbringing in the town of Henderson in the heart of Cajun country, about the grid of local streets here. She greeted one and all with the same missionary zeal, as if the right words could somehow undo the disaster of the past week.And when asked how she was doing, or even when they didn't, she replied: "I'm tired, but I'm hanging in. It's good. It's all good. God is good. We'll get through it."
Comments
???It appears that people everywhere are viewing the
disaster in the context of some broader ???national
failing.??? They are probably right ??? although to a
participant in the chaos, it seems trite to fit such
massive disorder into a symbolic little box. This is
a complete breakdown of normal reality. People have
no homes, no water, no power, no jobs, no mailing
addresses, no access to money. Today I managed to
reach an employee of mine who is still stuck in N.O.,
barbequing any food he can find and purchasing basic
survival necessities (plus booze and cigarettes) from
looters. When I asked him when he was leaving town he
told me he was going to stick around and ???tough it
out.??? He said he just didn???t have anywhere else to go.
Another employee sent me the following text message:
???what up gavin this is clydell g im in real bad shape
me and fam i need a place to go im real close to br
(baton rouge) see what you can do i have no money.??? A
third worker was last seen on TV being airlifted off
his roof in St. Bernard Parish.
People seem to be wondering why so many folks stayed
behind. If they lived here and knew the depth of
poverty here, they would understand. Many people from
N.O. have never traveled as far as Baton Rouge, just
over an hour away. The majority don???t even have cars
that could take them there - let alone when a massive
evacuation stretches that same drive out to 12 hours
or more. The media first aired estimates of 50 dead
in the city. Those who have lived here knew better.
The final toll will surely be in the thousands.
I???ve spent the last few days trying to find out
information on friends, employees, and property. On
Wednesday I drove into Baton Rouge to survey the
damage. The magnitude of the trauma really sank in
once I got down here. Baton Rouge has swelled to
double its normal population. Gas lines are hours
long and the streets are clogged with traffic. Whole
families have nowhere to stay ??? every hotel room
between Memphis and the Gulf Coast is booked.
Yesterday there was a shootout in a local mall, as
destitute refugees have started looting the stores for
provisions. As evacuees from the worst neighborhoods
of New Orleans flood the city, the tension is taking
on a foul racist cast. The national media keeps
focusing on how the disaster proves that white America
doesn???t care about the poor black man. The way I see
it, the opposite is true - he is obsessed with him.
People in the Deep South are seething with fury at the
thought of black thugs looting their beloved homes and
stealing their guns and other possessions.
Conversations keep turning to the justice of shooting
???them??? on sight. Rednecks everywhere are slavering at
the thought of open hunting season on the black
population of Orleans Parish.
I wish I had some more positive details to report.
The silver lining on this one has been tough to find.
The bad news keeps rolling out in a constant, brutal,
depressing flow. The whole Gulf South is full of
displaced people walking around like zombies. I get
the feeling that survivors are too shocked to ask the
hard questions: where will my kids go to school, how
can I ever find work, what happens when I run out of
medicine. In the meantime, Polly and I consider
ourselves blessed to have had the means to make it
out, and to have loved ones like all of you in our
lives. Thank you for your good wishes and generous
offers of help. We???ll be just fine.
Love,
G???
In Baton Rouge, a Cool Welcome
Class Divisions Among Blacks Greet New Orleans Evacuees
By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 6, 2005; Page A19
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 5 -- When this city's mayor, Melvin "Kip" Holden, issued a stem-winding warning that he would not tolerate "lawlessness" from arriving Hurricane Katrina evacuees, it seemed a page torn from the playbook of the celebrated former governor Huey Long, exposing an us-against-them dictate.
But many blacks here -- and those arriving from New Orleans -- were suddenly wondering whether this city was about to turn into a kind of ground zero of class warfare between blacks and blacks.
Holden himself is black, which had the potency of lifting the debate above the usual black-white fault lines.
"We know we don't want that criminal element," Sheila Mosby, 40, said while sitting on her front porch on the south side of this city and recalling scenes of recent looting in New Orleans. "I can understand trying to survive. But that element coming here, well, they might try to rob stores. To tell you the truth, it's really going to be something."
While dabbing at sweat beads with a pink hand towel, Mosby, who is black, went on: "Like Mayor Holden said, if they come down here and try to break into people's houses, and stores, there's a place for them."
She -- like the mayor -- was referring to the Baton Rouge jails.
Mosby said she envisioned "shoot to kill" orders if break-ins do occur.
Orders for the police? "No! From the people who live in these homes. They will shoot to kill. They gonna let these people know, 'You ain't in New Orleans. You in Baton Rouge.' "
This city of approximately 260,000 people, which lies 90 miles northwest of New Orleans, has not had the dramatic racial narratives of many other southern cities. There were bus boycotts in the 1960s -- and those of a certain age still remember a violent confrontation that took place during that decade between local Muslims and police here, which resulted in gunfire and injury.
Holden's comments seemed to bring to the surface the reality that local resources may well be strapped; that the holding-on blacks of this community realize there is sudden competition, from other blacks, for help in escaping poverty.
All day Sunday, hundreds had lined up at the Department of Social Services office to get assistance, especially food stamps. Many were Katrina evacuees, but hardly all.
"Now my biggest concern is the schools," said Tara Willimas, 34, a medical transcriber who is black and resides in Baton Rouge. "We don't mind sharing, but there's going to be competition for jobs."
I've thought about this a lot when they've had cities "volunteer their schools". For a lot of parents, what school their kid goes to and where is well thought out and well planned exercise. If you want to see culture clash, look at how things function at different schools only a few miles apart.
1.) You're going to get people (evacuees) who are not going to want to plunk their kids down in any old school. A lot of cities volunteered to let kids enroll at their public schools.
Some suburbanite is not going to want to drop their kids in on a random Chicago city school, for instance.
2.) And like this article says, cities and towns where evacuees are ending up are not going to be excited about having a bunch of kids from an impoverished inner-city school district plunked down in their schools.
It's not even racial a thing. Some public schools have no fights whatsoever the entire year, while other schools give the blind eye to all kinds of shit. I'm wondering how it's going to play out with kids that are accustomed to settling shit with fists get plunked into a quiet school district or kids that aren't used to that at all get dropped into one where it's commonplace.
I'm interested to see how they handle that.